


War Wounds

by flickawhip



Category: Home Fires (UK TV)
Genre: Alternate Ending, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-27
Updated: 2016-05-27
Packaged: 2018-07-10 13:51:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 1,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6987622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flickawhip/pseuds/flickawhip
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A look at how the War changes things. </p><p>LOTS of death and misery, you have been warned.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Steph

The letter she has always prayed not to receive comes to her, she reads it slowly, re-reading time and again until the message sinks in. It doesn’t take long and, soon enough, she is staring blankly at the wall, remembering everything. She swears she can feel her heart break in half, pain overwhelming everything for days at a time. 

Her son, her gentle and kind-hearted boy, changes, he hardens and pulls away. Silence falls at first, then, when he is working alone with the livestock, she leaves, walking through the fields in a daze, working on instinct alone. 

She will not tell anyone, how could she. Others have lost more. She has the farm, and Stan, her son. Except, she realizes, she won’t always have Stan, and he has pulled away so far she isn’t sure how to reach him anymore. 

She shuts down emotionally, goes from day to day, works only because she has to. If she had any other option she would leave, forever. Desperation claws at her and she fights, hard. 

Meetings at the WI are full of ghosts now, Miriam and Erica’s husbands, her Stan, Frances family except for Sarah, Sarah’s husband. The women do pull together and it’s all she can do to keep going, keep supporting them and taking support in return. 

When the war ends and Stan leaves, choosing a new life, she is left alone. Facing a future she never expected.


	2. Frances

Frances watches as the hall grows empty, then the rooms of the houses. They never use Erica’s home anymore, or Steph’s, or Miriam’s. She knows, instinctively, that Sarah can and will continue to share her home and her comforting gestures as best she can. 

She has grown used to being without anyone close, she has the WI and it’s enough, but she is aware of the war wounds thickening and scarring on her soul, the same scars many of them must now face. She is the one to reach out to Steph, then to Erica and Miriam, drawing her friends closer in a desperate attempt to hold at bay all her pain and memories. She remembers Peter, of course, lost to a car crash. It is a different pain she has, but she has borne it out. 

Sarah watches her, as always, even now Sarah is the softer of them, the kinder. She would hate her if she wasn’t so desperately frightened by what was left of the homes and families around her, not one has been left untouched. Her own war wounds she can cope with, watching her friends fall apart, she cannot handle, it is not her place and yet, if she could, she would take the pain from them all. 

The loss of Joyce hits hard. She has always been a problem, but she was also a friend, or as close to one as Frances has come since Alison and the WI girls. Frances feels fresh wounds burn into her soul, breaking it just that little bit more.


	3. Sarah

Loss. It’s something everyone has to face but the village of Great Paxford, though small, has faced it well. Frances, on losing Peter, had gone through a phase of refusing to see anyone, then, slowly, become a little more focused on helping her friends, Steph had battled through, war-torn and oddly fragile to look at but strong as steel. Sarah, on hearing that Adam had been captured had coped, on hearing that he had died, however, she had come undone. 

She had held so much hope that he might just survive, somehow, and come home. But he doesn’t, he can’t, he is gone. Gone to rest, to heaven as he believed. They muddle through, a group of women so battered by war it is a miracle none have taken some way out, but they stand stronger as a team. 

By the end of the war there is nothing left of the men of Great Paxford, only young Stan and David left to tell of the war efforts, Claire has moved with her family and so, it is truly only two who are seen in the village, then it is only David. 

Sarah feels her heart break a little more each time she sees a friend, someone she holds dear, struggling, and they all do. She does what she can to be their rock, but her own heart hurts.


	4. Erica

The loss of Will hurts, at first only a little, Erica is forced to hold strong for her children, for Kate who is home from her studies, but will return to finish them, for Laura, who holds her sister close and comforts her, but seeks the same soft comfort from her mother. 

Laura will leave with her pilot someday, and Kate will go back to London. Then, suddenly, both things happen. She is alone. Pain she has held back stabs at her from every direction, she worries about Kate, worries that Laura will be unhappy, hates that, someday, they will be forced to give up the surgery and their home. 

Erica buries herself in work, in the WI, in her children’s lives, but, beneath everything, at the end of long days with company, she is alone and then the same, familiar, pain creeps back. She struggles, fights her way through but she comes out weaker, more fragile than before. 

It is the WI who help, Steph who knows her pain well, becomes a close friend to her, Frances and Sarah push the WI to meet and Miriam, who has lost her rock, needs so much care she is able to push her own pain back. She finds strength in David, in Miriam’s baby, a sweet little girl who will be blessed to not remember the war. 

In the end, through everything, she holds strongly to her belief, that Will would not want her alone. It is this same belief that keeps her going to the WI, facing the ghosts of memories past, the room oddly warm and yet, filled with pain.


	5. Miriam

It is Steph who first sees the cracks beginning to show. It is Steph who helps with the child, seeing the baby to sleep before she begins to gather people around Miriam. There is little of the warmth left to Miriam. 

It is Frances who takes steps to ensure Miriam is not left alone. She brings them home, for a time, until Noah complains that Miriam keeps him awake with crying. She does what she can to find a place that is not haunted by memories for Miriam. 

It is Sarah who takes steps to see David settled as the owner of the shop, taking David under her wing and enabling Miriam to spend her time with her new-born. Nobody sees it, but Sarah has a way of handling David that is both motherly but strict, keeping him in line. 

It is Erica who takes Miriam in at last, seeing that, despite her own pain and despair, Miriam is doing her best to come through, to come back to the land of the living. Ghosts haunt them both, Erica aware even as she mothers Miriam that she is hiding her pain only well enough to fool the people outside her home. 

It is Miriam who asks to have the meetings, needing something, anything, to hold onto. Erica is kind, of course, and Sarah is quick to agree, but it is Steph who challenges Frances’ refusal. Steph is the one who pulls them tighter, pushes them on. They are all scarred by war, some more than others. 

The wounds of the war linger, the light no longer quite comes to Miriam’s smile, although, at times it does reach her eyes. Miriam is scarred, wounded in a visible way where many are able to hide their losses. Miriam’s skin tells a story as painful as her son’s always will. 

Erica too bears physical scars, small, but noticeable to those who care to look. It is Erica’s unflinching acceptance of her wounds that helps Miriam most to heal. Erica has been close since the plane, and she has not once tried to blame anyone but the plane. 

The fractured souls and wounded hearts of the women of Great Paxford heal only with help, and the WI forms a tighter bond than ever before.


End file.
